Taking the Pulse of the Eclipse Ecosystem

By Dana Gardner
Aug 28, 2008 4:00 AM PT

Java training and education has never been easy. Not only are the language and its third-party and community offerings constantly moving targets, each developer has his or her own preferences, plug-ins inventory and habits. What's more, the "book knowledge" gained in many course settings can vary wildly from what happens in the "real world" of communities and teams.

MyEclipse maker Genuitec developed Pulse last year to monitor and update the most popular Eclipse plug-ins, but Pulse also has a powerful role in making Java training and tools preferences configuration management more streamlined, automated and extensible. Unlike commercial software, in the open source, community-driven environments like Eclipse, there is no central vendor to manage plug-ins and updates. For the Eclipse community, Pulse does that, monitoring for updates while managing individual developers' configuration data -- and at the same time gathering metadata about how to better serve Eclipse and Java developers.

I recently moderated a sponsored podcast to explore how Pulse, and best practices around its use, help organize and automate tools configuration profiles for better ongoing Java training and education. I spoke with Michael Cote, an analyst with RedMonk; Ken Kousen, an independent technical trainer, president of Kousen IT, and adjunct professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; and Todd Williams, vice president of technology at Genuitec.

Ken Kousen: The gap between what's taught in academia and what's taught in the real world is very large, actually. Academia will talk about abstractions of data structures, algorithms, and different techniques for doing things. Then, when people get into the real world, they have no idea what Spring, Hibernate, or any of the other issues really are.

It's also interesting that a lot of developments in this field tend to flow from the working professionals toward academia, rather than the other way around, which is what you would find in engineering.

Todd Williams: Part of what I see as being difficult, especially in the Java and Enterprise Java market, is the huge number of technologies that are being employed at different levels. Each company picks its own type of stack. Finding employees that fit with what you are trying to do today, with an eye toward being able to mature them into where you are going tomorrow, is probably going to always be the concern.

Michael Cote: You look at the employment patterns that most developers find themselves in, and they are not really working at some place three, five, 10, even 20 years. It's not realistic. So, specializing in some technology that essentially binds you to a job isn't really an effective way to make sure you can pay your bills for the rest of your life.

You have to be able to pick up quickly any given technology or any stack, whether it's new or old. Every company has their own stack that they are developing. You also have to remember that there is plenty of old existing software out there that no one really talks about anymore. People need to maintain and take care of it.

So, whether you are learning a new technology or an old technology, the role of the developer now, much more so in the past, is to be more of a generalist who can quickly learn anything without support from their employer.

Williams: Obviously, in open source, whether it's something like the Eclipse Foundation, Apache, or what have you, they make a very explicit effort to communicate what they are doing through either bug reports, mail lists, and discussion groups. So it's an easy way to get involved as just a monitor of what's going on. I think you could learn quite a bit from just seeing how the interactions play out.

That's not exactly the same type of environment they would see inside closed-wall corporate development, simply because the goals are different. Less emphasis is put on external communications and more emphasis is put on getting quality software out the door extremely quickly. But, there are a lot of very good techniques and communication patterns to be learned in the open source communities.

[With Pulse] we built a general-purpose software provisioning system that right now we are targeting at the Eclipse market, specifically Eclipse developers. For our initial release last November, we focused on providing a simple, intuitive way that you could install, update and share custom configurations with Eclipse-based tools.

In Pulse 2, which is our current release, we have extended those capabilities to address what we like to call team-synchronization problems. That includes not only customized tool stacks, but also things like workspace project configurations and common preference settings. Now you can have a team that stays effectively in lock step with both their tools and their workspaces and preferences.

With Pulse, we put these very popular, well-researched plug-ins into a catalog, so that you can configure these types of tool stacks with drag-and-drop. So, it's very easy to try new things. We also bring in some of the social aspects; pulling in the rankings and descriptions from other sources like Eclipse Plug-in Central and those types of things.

So, within Pulse, you have a very easy way to start out with some base technology stacks for certain kinds of development and you can easily augment them over time and then share them with others.

The Pulse Web site is www.poweredbypulse.com. There is a little 5 MB installer that you download and start running. If anyone is out in academia, and they want to use Pulse in a setting for a course, please fill out the contact page on the Web site. Let us know, and we will be glad to help you with that. We really want to see usage in academia grow. We think it's very useful. It's a free service, so please let us know, and we will be glad to help.

Kousen: I did try it in a classroom, and it's rather interesting, because one of the students that I had recently this year was coming from the Microsoft environment. I get a very common experience with Microsoft people, in that they are always overwhelmed by the fact, as Todd said, there are so many choices for everything. For Microsoft, there is always exactly one choice, and that choice costs $400.

I tried to tell them that here we have many, many choices, and the correct choice, or the most popular choice changes all the time. It can be very time consuming and overwhelming for them to try to decide which ones to use in which circumstances.

So, I set up a couple of configurations that I was able to share with the students. Once they were able to register and download them, they were able to get everything in a self-contained environment. We found that pretty helpful.

It was pretty straightforward for everybody to use. ... whenever you get students downloading configurations, they have this inevitable urge to start experimenting, trying to add in plug-ins, and replacing things. I did have one case where the configuration got pretty corrupted, not due to anything that they did in Pulse, but because of plug-ins they added externally. We just basically scrapped that one and started over and it came out very nicely. So, that was very helpful in that case.

Williams: We have a very large product plan for Pulse. We've only had it out since November, but you're right. We do have a lot of profile information, so if we chose to mine that data, we could find some correlations between the tools that people use, like some of the buying Web sites do.

People who buy this product also like this one, and we could make ad hoc recommendations, for example. It seems like most people that use Subversion also use Ruby or something, and you just point them to new things in the catalog. It's kind of a low-level way to add some value. So there are certainly some things under consideration.

Dana Gardner is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, which tracks trends, delivers forecasts and interprets the competitive landscape of enterprise applications and software infrastructure markets for clients. He also produces BriefingsDirect sponsored podcasts. Disclosure: Genuitec is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.